Portal:Corporate Rights/Is Corporate Personhood Actually Part of America's Jurisprudence?

In an interview with Alternet, historian and Brookings Institution scholar Thom Hartmann discusses the history of corruption that led to the development of so-called "corporate personhood" in the late-19th century. "Corporate personhood" is the theory of jurisprudence that holds that corporations enjoy the same Constitutional rights as human beings.

In the interview (and in his book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People -- And How You Can Fight Back), Hartmann describes how the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case that supposedly established corporate personhood, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, actually did nothing of the sort. The case established "corporate personhood" not based on the majority's actual opinion, but because a corporatist Clerk of Courts mislabeled the case headnotes. Hartmann also identified a clearly corrupt 9th Circuit judge, Steven J. Field, who made a deal with the railroads (the largest corporations of the time) to try establishing a corporate personhood jurisprudence, and sent cases to the Supreme Court to advance this agenda.

Since this mistaken interpretation, corporations have tried to advance the concept of "corporate personhood," or corporate constitutional rights. Since the 1970s, when the Supreme Court adopted the construst of "commercial speech," corporations have focused increasingly on the First Amendment. Their most recent success and most devastating from the standpoint of its effect on the rights of citizens is the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

Read the full interview with Thom Hartmann here.